Cautiously Optimistic

This is why I do daily weighing. This looks like back on trend. It may pop back up tomorrow, but for now I'll take it.




- iPhone uPdate

Discouraged

Not a high energy week, in contrast to last weekend. And the weight per scale is steadily climbing UP despite low calories and low carbs in. I imagine its water. I think my total calories were too low this weekend, and I bumped them up this week. This week I also allowed carbs to drift up to 25 versus 20 grams as the target. Maybe I need to push that back down. I'll persist for another week before thinking about a change.

I bought Halloween candy yesterday. I want to be on a restrictive diet that enforces the "none at all" before we get into The Eating Season. But if I have no results, it will be hard to stick to rules.

Weight:


Proportions:


Exercise:


Sunday's exercise:


- iPhone uPdate

Playing with my heart rate

I am newly energized to look at my heart rate when exercising, thanks to my friend's recommendation to read Younger Next Year. I remember I got my first heart rate monitor in 1998, during the time of my Big Loss, in Texas on a business trip. I was fanatical about daily workouts on my Nerdic Trak in those days, but not ready to go to a hotel gym where I might see someone I knew. So I was out for a walk in the not-pedestrian friendly suburbs, and found a sporting goods store. I was extremely ignorant, looked at the watches, and didn't even realize it came with a chest strap till I got to my room and unpacked it.

It did open my eyes about how hard I was or was not working. I was extremely surprised how little correlation there was between my subjective feeling of how hard I was working and what showed on the heart rate monitor. Likewise, the NT has a speedometer but on different days the same speed took different levels of effort on the heart. A couple of times, I couldn't push the heart rate up high at all, and later that day I realized I was sick with a cold. I would have figured differently, that the heart would race when ill, but at least in these cases, not so.

Today I was down on the treadmill for a serious workout. I still have illusions about doing a 5K in less than a month but I haven't even been walking that far, so I need to buckle down. Intervals are the way to go, but I'm not able to progress as fast as my Couch-to-5K schedule I used last time. Still, I dream of running easily along a trail, smiling, working, but not killing myself.

Heart rate zones have gotten more complicated than back in 1998 when I applied the classic formula to understand my workout zones. The classic max heart rate is 220 minus your age (which yields 162 for me). Then simple percentages give zones: 65% is 107, 75% is 121, 85% is 138, and 150 is 93%.

I think these are too low for me now. Fifteen years ago, I comfortably worked out on the NT with the heart around 135 beats per minute, which should have been around 75%. I can still do that rate, but now that is around 85%, by the classic formula. There are many other formulas, and I have no doubt I'll read up and figure it out, but not today.

Today's fabulous workout was focused on working my heart rate, but I pushed it up higher than the formula would have recommended, but it felt right. First, I ran four intervals, aiming for 3 minutes running and 90 seconds walking, but adjusted to what my heart was saying about how hard I was working. I slowed down the speed on the treadmill, because at 6 miles per hour I just work too hard too fast. So I only went to 5.5 mph. The first three minutes got me up to 138 only. After a minute of walking, I was down to 120. After that, for the next three intervals, the heart realized I was serious and climbed higher. Each time, I let it get to 150 and then kept on pounding along for 30 seconds and then slowed down.

After the intervals, I walked. I do not like to walk fast. 3.2 miles per hour, or 3.3, is a very comfortable cadence for me. I just don't get comfortable at faster speeds, and the classic 4 mph has me breaking into an uncomfortable jog. Must be short legs. But I've learned I can get the heart rate up by increasing the incline of the treadmill. So I finished out the 3.11 miles by holding my heart rate around 135 by varying the tilt at a constant speed. I started out at a steep incline, and the heart rate drifted up so I backed off. As it went down, I could bump it back up by making a bigger hill. I got into it, and I found the pace quite comfortable, like I could keep it up all day. Except, not really. I was thrilled to come to the end.

A shower and stretching and I feel great. Blew the dust out of the pipes. The trick is to keep moving for the rest of the day.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Active Exercise (with new graphs!)

As often happens to me, I got inspired by a new book. I won't write about the book just yet, but my inspiration came from this blog post.  I'm not all the way through, but I'm taking the point about needing to exercise, not just move around a bit.The book focuses on heart rate as a gauge of exercise, which is a good way to do it. However, I've got much more complete data from my nifty BMF device I've been wearing for four years.

The BMF measures movement with accelerometers, and adds measurement of skin temperature and skin impedance/conductivity (ie, how much you are sweating!).  This is why its such an intrusive device compared to the Fitbit, Nike bands, etc. The company claims its well calibrated, and those few comparisons I can find on the web agree it measures overall activity better than any other device.  The BMF measures "mets" which I have never bothered to research - I first heard of them using the Wii Fit, which also uses them. It allows some customization of how many mets equals "moderate activity" and how many equals "vigorous activity".  I made an adjustment to lower the threshold for "vigorous" because after wearing the device initially for a few weeks I never got to vigorous!  So my definition of moderate is 3 mets to 5.5 mets, and vigorous is anything over 5.5 mets.

I made some brand-new graphs to look at my exercise history, using this data which has been collected all along.  Here is the total exercise history:

You can faintly make out along the bottom some darker red bars - those are "vigorous" exercise - hardly any!  I broke out just the vigorous, and got this:

I have no idea what happened on November 14, 2010, my all-time high for vigorous exercise.  I went back and looked at old blog posts, the closest thing I have to a diary, and there is nothing the explains it. More interestingly, the concentrated vigorous exercise is in early 2012, when I decided to start running and train for some 5Ks. It really did get me moving.

The book recommends 45 minutes of exercise a day, six days a week. It further recommends breaking that out to two days of vigorous aerobic exercise, two days of more moderate, and two days of weight training.It is easy for me to accumulate 45 minutes of moderate exercise, and I do give myself credit for active housework here. But I have had less than 10 days in four years where I did 40 or more minutes of vigorous exercise!

I am focusing on moving more, and its having its results. Here is just this year's exercise log:

Again, the discerning eye may see some darker coloring at the bottom - that is vigorous exercise, as I try running again.

Based on book recommendations, I need to focus on that 45 minutes daily piece, and keep up trying to up the ante with running.  Just as an aside, I've almost never found myself moving into "vigorous" territory with anything but running. Jumping jacks at the gym workout, sure, but that's in tiny bursts. Because the extra stress running puts on my body, I'll have to figure out other options eventually.

Excelsior!

Buckling down with Atkins

I've written before about my recurrent trend hovering around the same weight- for more than two years! I'm pretty sure that maintaining my weight within a five pound band, even with a pattern of rapid loss followed by slow gain, is more good for me than bad.

I drifted upward in weight over the summer, and its time to wrestle it back down. I started by simply cutting back and upping the exercise. (This sounds very simple but its not. Especially the activity levels. I just couldn't have done it sooner for other reasons.)

But I got re-energized with Atkins as the way to eat. I surfed into a video of Gary Taubes again explaining what really is going on in our bodies with nutrition. Here is my understanding of the explanation which makes total sense to me.

We don't get fat because we eat too much while exercising too little. When we eat too many calories and burn too few calories, the result is we get fat, but there is no "because" there. Why do we eat more? Why do we burn less? Its not because of sloth and gluttony, moral failings on our part. There are many physiological reasons, but the big one for Americans today is insulin regulation. Sugar and simple carbs are the reason we eat more. Carbs make us hungry and screws up out insulin and other hormones. And on the calorie burn side, exercise has less impact than your internal hormonally driven metabolism regulation, which is also affected by the carbs. For many people, simply cutting the carbs sharply with no other changes will result in a weight loss. But for many people that have eaten otherwise for years, it is more complicated than that. And even for those for whom the magic formula works, it is very hard to persist in our society that doesn't build menus that way.

Nuances I have picked up: many people who try Atkins get the "fat is not bad for you" message and so end up after a time eating the worst of all possible worlds- high fat AND high carb. This is a recipe for all the bad things that come from bad nutrition, not just fat but unhealthy hearts and diabetes. So after being on Atkins for a while, moving away from strict adherence is a time for caution.

Here's a tidbit I got from a new book I just started: Mild depression is a positive evolutionary adaptation! I love this, understanding why our bodies have evolved to do certain things. We evolved as hunter gatherers, moving all the time. The only reason NOT to move was because food was scarce. So hunkering down, slowing your metabolism to make it through the dry season, or the winter, was an adaptive semi-hibernation type strategy. The obvious problem we have is we have no food shortage during the time our metabolism is dialed down. The trick is learning how to break the depression-which is the catalyst and which the result? Does moving break it, or does it break for other reasons, and then we start moving? I'm only a little way in the book, maybe the answer will appear.

In the mean time, I'm experiencing the basic Atkins induction rapid loss of 4-5 pounds of water. Very rewarding to step on the scale each day and see huge progress. I know my normal pattern would be two more weeks of faithful adherence which cements the gains into true loss, followed by several months of allowing it to creep back up. Stay tuned to see how I handle this.




What's different this time so far: I started up running before going into Atkins. I've kept it up, and I have a 5K coming up. The Atkins book does not recommend starting exercise the same time as the diet, but I'm currently more focused on strong versus slim.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Making Changes

It's been two weeks since my last post, and I've made some changes. I love my graphs, and they provide both information for me to use, and motivation to make the line on the graph head in another direction. As it turns out, I've managed to up my average calories burned each day by just under 200 calories!  I don't think I'm being a total fanatic, either. It's a walk at lunch, and more active in the evenings. Oh, and the running. Did I mention I signed up for the Dead Man's Run 5K six weeks from now?

The faint green line is the daily total calories burned, the dark green line is a running weekly average, and the flat lines are the monthly averages. Last date is 9/7/2013.

Here's the graph of calories expended this year - can you pick out the moment I decided to get more active? (Note to nerds: the 200 calorie improvement is the last two weeks' average compared to the previous two weeks' average. Can't really pick that out on the graph.)

Right now it feels like I'm entering a new, good routine, but it also involves a large number of ongoing obligations. I'm not so good at the sustaining things for the longer term, I'm better at blitz approaches. But my girl and I are volunteering at an animal shelter, with a minimum number of hours for each month required. My girl has some other ongoing activities that require support and transportation - and oh yes, school has started, so time spent on the pesky homework has to happen.

In addition, I've signed up for a class that will start in October - actually, two classes, one on-line and one in person. I've finally got my boat working, and the last three weekends have included magnificent, if brief, voyages. My mother is driving less, and so I'm making the trek out to her place more often.  I have to really do some training if I'm going to run the 5K (I confess now what I don't think I admitted here before: Last year, I just picked up the Tshirt and bagged the race).

So why does this all seem so manageable now?

It must be because work has been manageable. No one has threatened to fire me for at least four months. Many wonks have been on vacation. I've got some excellent folks on my immediate team. Your federal government will swing into its dysfunctional gears starting tomorrow, and some of that nonsense will trickle down to yours truly. Hopefully, I can continue doing a decent job without having all my emotional and physical energy sucked out of me while doing it.

And more than coincidentally, I've made three magnificent voyages in the past three weeks!